The Nobel Prize for Literature was announced this morning amid much anticipation–ok, at least there was some anticipation within a small subset of the literary community. I knew the prize was to be awarded this morning, and I also knew that the list of nominees included Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon–all familiar literary heavy-hitters. However, I had never heard of Herta Muller until this morning. Ditto with last year’s recipient, Jean Marie Le Clezio.

The announcement comes in the wake of last year’s controversial comments by the Nobel Committee’s outgoing permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, who remarked that American literature was not worthy of the prestigious Nobel, as America is too insular a country and “Europe still is the center of the literary world…not the United States.” The last American writer to win was Toni Morrison, in 1993, and prior to that, Saul Bellow was the last North American writer to win, in 1976 (he was a Canadian citizen, but lived most of his life in the US).

In addition to looking like the type of woman you’d want to be friends with, Herta was awarded the prize because “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, [she] depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” It is this voice of the dispossessed, those who live under dictatorships and struggle for basic human rights, that the Nobel committee seems most concerned with in their prize considerations. Perhaps it is for this reason that Americans are roundly snubbed.

What do you think? Is American fiction too isolated from the global experience to be considered a player in the wider literary world?

Photo: Jens Meyer / Associated Press